Intimately connected with the advanced views of nature, which we find in Genesis i., is the "purified" notion of God found there. The most important point is that a special word is employed, which stands for nothing else than the creative agency of God, and so dissociates it from all analogy with human making and shaping— a word of such exclusive significance that it cannot be reproduced either in Latin, or in Greek, or in German. In a youthful people such a theological abstraction is unheard of; and so with the Hebrews we find both the word and the notion only coming into use after the Babylonian exile; they appear along with the emphatic statement of the creative omnipotence of Jehovah with reference to nature, which makes its appearance, we may say suddenly, in the literature of the exile, plays a great part in the Book of Job, and frequently presents itself in Isaiah xl.-lxvi. In Genesis ii. iii., not nature but man is the beginning of the world and of history; whether a creation out of nothing is assumed there at all, is a question which only the mutilation of the commencement (before ii. 4b) makes it not quite impossible to answer in the affirmative. At any rate it is not the case here that the command of the Creator sets things in motion at the first so that they develop themselves to separate species out of the universal chaos; Jehovah Himself puts His hand to the work, and this supposes that the world in its main features was already in existence. He plants and waters the garden, He forms man and breathes life into his nostrils, He builds the woman out of the man's rib, having made a previous attempt, which was unsuccessful, to provide him with company; the beasts are living witnesses of the failure of His experiments. In other respects, too, He proceeds like a man. In the evening when it grows cool He goes to walk in the garden, and when there discovers by chance the transgression which has taken place, and holds an investigation in which He makes not the least use of His omniscience. And when He says: "Behold, the man is become like one of us to know good and evil: and now lest he stretch forth his hand, and take of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever," that is not said in irony, any more than when He expresses Himself on the occasion of the building of Babel; "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of their doings, and now nothing will be too difficult for them that they have imagined to do; go to, let us go down and confound their language." That at the same time the majesty of Jehovah is in no way compromised is the mystery of poetic genius. How would the colourless God of abstraction fare in such a situation ?
The treatment, finally, of the microcosm in the two accounts, reflects the difference between them. In chapter i. man is directed at the very outset to the ground on which he moves to this day: "Replenish the earth, and subdue it," he is told; a perfectly natural task. In chaps. ii. iii. he is placed in Paradise, and his sphere of activity there, nestled, as he may be said still to be, in the lap of the Deity, is very limited. The circumstances of his life as it now is, the man's toil in the fields, the woman's toil in bearing children, do not answer to his original destiny; they are not a blessing, but a curse. In the Jehovistic narrative man is as wonderful to himself as the external world; in the other he is as much a matter of course as it is. In the one he sees astonishing mysteries in the difference of the sexes, in marriage, in child-birth (iv. 1); in the other these are physiological facts which raise no questions or reflections: "He made them male and female, and said, Be fruitful and multiply." There his attitude towards the beasts is one of mixed familiarity and bewilderment; he does not know exactly what to make of them; they are allied to him and yet not quite suitable society for him; here they are beings not related to him, over which he rules.
The chief point in which the difference between the two accounts comes to a head is this. In Genesis ii. iii., man is virtually forbidden to lift the veil of things, and to know the world, represented in the tree of knowledge. In Genesis i. this is the task set him from the beginning; he is to rule over the whole earth, and rule and knowledge come to the same thing—they mean civilisation. There nature is to him a sacred mystery: here it is a mere fact, an object; he is no longer bewildered over against nature, but free and superior. There it is a robbery for man to seek to be equal with God: here God makes him at first in His own image and after His own likeness, and appoints him His representative in the realm of nature. We cannot regard it as fortuitous that in this point Genesis i. asserts the opposite of Genesis ii. iii.; the words spoken with such emphasis, and repeated i. 27, v. 1, ix. 6, sound exactly like a protest against the view underlying Genesis ii. iii., a protest to be explained partly by the growth of moral and religious cultivation, but partly also no doubt due to the convulsive efforts of later Judaism to deny that most firmly established of all the lessons of history, that the sons suffer for the sins of the fathers. /1/
— Footnote 1. A coarser counterpart to Genesis ii. iii, is Genesis vi. 1-4. Here also there is a kind of fall of man in an attempt to overpass the boundary between the human race and the divine. In the priestly narrative (Q) the gulf between spirit, which is divine substance, and flesh, which is human substance, is bridged over by the doctrine of man's creation in the image of God. — Footnote
What are generally cited as points of superiority in Genesis i. over Genesis ii. iii. are beyond doubt signs of progress in outward culture. The mental individuality of the two writers, the systematiser and the genius, cannot be compared, and the difference in this respect tells nothing of their respective dates; but in its general views of God, nature, and man, Genesis i. stands on a higher, certainly on a later, level. To our way of thinking its views are more intelligible, simpler, more natural, and on this account they have been held to be also older. But this is on the one hand to identify naturalness with originality, two things which every one knows not to be the same, and on the other hand it is applying a standard to prehistoric tradition which applies to historical tradition only: freedom from miracle and myth count in favour of the latter, but not of the former. But the secret root of the manifest preference long shown by historic-critical theology for Genesis i. appears to lie in this, that scholars felt themselves responsible for what the Bible says, and therefore liked it to come as little as possible in conflict with general culture. /1/
— Footnote 1. I merely assert that Genesis ii. iii. is prior to Genesis i.; I do not believe the story of Paradise and of the Fall to be very old with the Israelites. We are led to think so by the fact that the man and the woman stand at the head of the genealogy of the human race; a place we should rather expect to be assigned to the serpent (according to primitive Semitic belief the serpent was by no means opposed to God). This is the case in the Chronicon Edessenum and in Abyssinian legend, and a trace of this is perhaps preserved in the name of Eve, as Noldeke thinks. The name certainly receives this interpretation in Philo (de agric. Noe, # 21) and in the Midrash Rabba on Genesis iii. 20 (D. M. Z. 1877, p. 239, 326). Moreover, the true seat of God to the Hebrews was Mount Sinai, and the original Hebrew life was the nomadic life of the patriarchs, not gardening or agriculture. And finally we cannot believe barbarians to have indulged in reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of civilisation. The materials of Genesis ii. iii. can hardly have been imported before the time of Solomon. Where they came from we can scarcely guess; it would be most natural to think of the Phoenicians or the Canaanites generally, and this theory is favoured by Genesis iv. But in JE Babel is regarded as the last home of the primitive human race, Eden and Nod having preceded it; and the Hebrews probably derived the legend in the last instance from Babylon. But this does not prove that this or that parallel brought forward by Assyriologists is necessarily of value. — Footnote
VIII.I.2. After the beginning of the world we have in Genesis i.-xi., both in the Priestly Code and in the Jehovist, the transition from Adam to Noah (chapters iv. v.), then the flood (vi.-ix.), then the transition from Noah to Abraham (chapters x. xi.).
In the dry names, which are enumerated in Genesis v. and Genesis iv. Buttmann recognised the remains of an historical connection once woven together out of primitive stories. These narratives were evidently mythological: their original contents are destroyed both in Genesis v. (Q) and in Genesis iv. (JE), but only the list of the Jehovist now bears the appearance of a ruin. In the other the fragments have been used for a careful new building in which they no longer look like fragments. Here they are made to serve as the pillars of a chronology which descends from Adam to Moses, computing the period from the one to the other as 2666 years. These 2666 years represent 26 2/3 generations of a hundred years each: namely, 1-20 Adam to Abraham, 21 Isaac, 22 Jacob, 23 Levi, 24 Kohath, 25 Amram, 26 Aaron; the last 2/3 of a generation is Eleazar, who was a man of mature years at the time of the Exodus. /2/
— Footnote 2. So Noldeke in the Jahrbb. fuer protest. Theol., 1875, p. 344. Genesis xv. 13-16 expressly states that the generation is reckoned as 100 years in this period. — Footnote
Such a chronology is totally at variance with the simplicity of the legend. /1/ It is also evident, that if even in the case of the